Long Beach council considers solution to unpaid parking tickets

LONG BEACH - A hosted system to administer parking citations and collect fines could initially cost $600,000 and take until September of next year to be fully operational, according to city Director of Financial Management John Gross.

The estimate, delivered to the City Council on Tuesday, comes after an audit released last week showed that almost $18 million in parking fines have gone unpaid in the past three years.

The report by City Auditor Laura Doud traced problems in the collections to a 12-year-old software system that has few automated processes and no connection to Department of Motor Vehicles databases to keep current car registration information up-to-date.

Doud's request to implement a new system, which Gross speculated could boost citation revenue by as much as $3 million if combined with aggressive collection efforts, was well-received by the council.

"To invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to save millions is good return," said Councilman Gary DeLong.

However, DeLong urged city staff to find interim solutions until the long-term solution is identified.

The city currently collects about 70 percent of its parking fines on about 345,000 citations processed each year, Doud said. Revenues from tickets totaled about $13 million in 2011.

Last week, Doud said Commercial Services Bureau staff, which handles citation processing, completed a labor-intensive purge of old data on fines now considered uncollectible due to state law that limits towing of noncompliant transgressors to within five years of an offense.

Gross said the city hasn't aggressively pursued its parking debts because of the system's deficiencies. An examination of 200 serial offender records made during the audit found that 86 percent didn't have current registration information.

"We did not want to create false problems (that) impact people's credit reports when we had data problems," Gross said.

Also on Tuesday, the council voted 9-0 to commission an independent actuary to study potential cost savings if nonpublic safety employee pension benefits were lowered.

Currently, employees receive 2.5 percent of salary for each year worked and can retire at age 55. The actuary would report on the effects of lowering the benefit to 1.5 percent of salary per year with retirement at age 65.

Additional pension cost-sharing between employees and the city would also be studied.

The subjects are hypothetical because present law doesn't allow changing existing benefits.